How to Lead Your Sales Team With Confidence When the Economy Shifts

Times of economic uncertainty and decreased consumer confidence are inevitable, and these downturns during the economic cycle can be particularly challenging for sales organizations. It’s no secret that 2022 trends show a leveling of growth and steadily declining consumer confidence across global markets. Even though market stagnation can make it harder for your team to sell and meet quota, it also offers an opportunity to distinguish yourself from the competition and double down on sales fundamentals to emerge with renewed growth. 

So how do you best support and lead your sales organization to rise above the fray? We pulled together key strategies from veteran sales leaders.

Focus on Value

If your customers are facing challenges that come with a down market, help your sales team get focused on being relevant to changing customer needs and providing value where it matters most. Rally your team around a customer-centric mindset. Forward-thinking sales leaders are helping their organization focus on uncovering customer needs, justifying buy-in and positioning their solution as their customer’s ticket out of business pains. Partnerships forged in these times could be the most loyal for years to come.

As your customers’ needs change, your differentiation shifts. Dig into emerging consumer problems to define an updated value offering for the current state of the market. Analyze how your answers to these questions have or will change due to your customer’s current position:

• What mission critical outcomes will your solution provide for customers?
• How specifically will your solution provide these business outcomes?
• How do you provide better value than your competition, even at a higher investment?
• What proof do you have to demonstrate capability of providing these outcomes?

Define a specific message of value that answers the new questions sellers will inevitably face, making them confident and capable to sell in any environment.

Invest in Your Sales Team

Creating synergy between message and execution at every level of your organization can empower your team to sell more intentionally, leading to bigger and better wins. To minimize the impact of a down market on sales performance, use this time to clearly define your offering and evaluate how your sales team is spending their time. Ensure your team is spending time on potential clients who have the ability and appetite to thrive through this season, and give your people the messaging to be relevant to these buyers.

Provide your sales team with a custom qualification framework by defining what a great deal looks like for your company. Identify what is important to your buyer in the selling process, especially given the changing economic environment and align your qualification to those needs. Here are a few important qualification actions to consider in light of economic change:

• Utilize metrics and proof points to directly align to customer outcomes
• Identify all stakeholders and their decision criteria early in the process
• Influence decision criteria by instilling value and differentiation from the first conversation

Once you’ve outlined how qualification looks in your organization, the key to driving adoption is to equip managers with a playbook to reinforce key behaviors in your sales reps on the front line. Force Management’s Managing Direction, Brian Walsh, said in a recent conversation, "The forecast is an outcome. Spend more time making sure [managers] know how to coach, and watch what happens to the forecast."

Be intentional about supporting managers on implementation: clearly define benchmarks and success indicators, and set aside time for manager training that emphasizes coaching rather than inspection. By equipping managers to lead adoption of new qualification methods, you create alignment on a more collaborative and confident forecasting process that drives consistent outcomes for your organization.

Lead From the Front

Prioritize active leadership to provide a morale boost. Consider the strategies that you or other elite leaders have utilized successfully during previous times of rapid change. What can you do differently this time than in previous years?

In a conversation with CCO of BlueVoyant, Paul Kleinschnitz, on the Audible-Ready Podcast, he notes, “When people understand what you’re doing, when they’re bought in and have emotional connection to it, you see the results.”